Learning Humility

Humility should be taught in school, along with tact, ethics and critical thinking. And not just in graduate school, but early and officially. Naturally, out-of-class experiences at most schools impart valuable lessons in humility and tact, though these are, in general less structured—and more painful—than they ought to be. Instead of actually learning tools that will make us better people, we learn the coarse rules that make us better workers. Even though we spend at least 13 solid years of the best days of our lives in school, it’s only later that we begin to learn valuable lessons—and only then if we are lucky enough to find a willing teacher.

Delusions of Competence by Scott Adams (The Dilbert Blog) describes the microcosm of one man’s relationship with his wife.[1] His wife would doubtless swear up and down that she’s not nearly as smart as her fancy-pants, philosopher-wannabe husband—but still ends up being right more often than not when they disagree about something. And it seems Mr. Adams has learned enough humility to recognize this fact, as illustrated in the following citation from his story about cleaning up the kitchen after Thanksgiving. While attempting to clean up the dishes, he was faced with the dilemma of what to do about the left-over ham: throw it out or save parts of it?

“I either had to make an executive decision (probably wrong) or risk being seen as an unhelpful spouse. I decided that my best option was to bide my time until Shelly got back. I started to slowly gather up used dishes and put them in the dishwasher. This is something I knew I could do right. And by “right” I mean I generally fill the dishwasher to 100% capacity and then Shelly rearranges things to make room for 90 additional items.”

And that, right there, is the lesson of humility: everyone has their strengths and one of yours, no matter how hard you try, is not loading a dishwasher. An aloof prick might say “so what? I don’t need to know how to do that.” To which the obvious answer is: but someone does and you’re clearly inept at it. Be happy there’s someone else around to do it or you’d be hip-deep in dirty dishes in no time.

Know your own weaknesses and surround yourself with one or more people whose strengths fill those voids. Accept that you’re not as good as other people at some things, but keep plugging away, even if you’re still almost always wrong.

“Had I made the ham decision unilaterally I would have later heard the question ‘Why did you put garbage in Tupperware and store it in the refrigerator?’”

Yeah, Scott, what the f*#@k were you thinking?